This is an interview carried out on Tues 26 Feb, 2013, with the Booker Prize winner Anne Enright on her visit to Dalarna in connection with the Irish Itinerary Programme, Feb-March 2013. It was filmed by the Media Dept, Dalarna University and published on Youtube in Sept 2013.

The idea of the body as a vital component of existence and an important means for the articulation of experience is the theme of Irene Gilsenan Nordin’s essay, ‘“Betwixt and Between”: The Body as Liminal Threshold in the Poetry of Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin.’ Drawing upon Merleau-Ponty’s ideas of embodiment, and Kristeva’s concepts of the semiotic and the symbolic, Gilsenan Nordin explores the notion of the body as a liminal threshold in Ní Chuilleanáin’s poetry. The essay explores the interaction between self and world and argues that in challenging unitary conceptions of space and time, Ní Chuilleanáin shows how the body, or ‘flesh,’ to use Merleau-Ponty’s term, acts as a transformational site between thought and language, self and world, the subject and the unnameable other. Gilsenan Nordin argues that Ní Chuilleanáin in her poetry shows that the speaking- subject is an embodied subject, firmly situated at the point where the mind is inseparable from our bodily, physical nature. Thus the poetic voice gives articulation to the interconnectedness between the physical and spiritual dimensions of human existence. In giving expression to the silent forces of desire Ní Chuilleanáin’s work can be seen not least in an ethical sense, as giving voice to the silenced, unspoken voices of bodily experience.

This paper addresses the themes of self, gender and community in Alexander McCall Smith’s best-selling series, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency, focusing on the character of Precious Ramotswe, that “very, very fine lady,” the central character of the series. Set in Gaborone, Botswana, The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency describes the life of Mma Ramotswe, the first woman in Botswana to enter the profession of private detective, and who, by determination and intelligence, sets out to help those in need and to make Botswana a better place. In his portrayal of Mma Ramotswe, McCall Smith explores what he calls “all that is fine in the human condition.” Mma Ramotswe is a character who looks on life positively and, through her empathy and generosity, inspires people around her. She shows qualities such as integrity, compassion and forgiveness, and by her moral judgement and attention to interpersonal relationships, she highlights important dimensions of human experience.
This paper explores the communicative ethical aspects of Mma Ramotswe’s actions, in light of what the philosopher Seyla Benhabib calls “situating the self.” Using her own resources to create her own identity, Mma Ramotswe, enters into the public sphere, and mediating between “public norms” and “private values,” she demonstrates agency, autonomy and selfhood. By displaying an embodied subjectivity grounded in everyday life, she re-negotiates women’s marginalised positionality and seeks out alternatives for action and empowerment.

This is a study of the Irish, Nobel prize-winning poet Seamus Heaney’s Seeing Things (1991), a volume which marks a turning point in Heaney’s writing. From an earlier concern with the outer physicality of things, Heaney turns with deepened awareness to the inner landscapes of the mind, where the thingness of things is explored and expressed in language. The dissertation examines this new departure in the light of what Heidegger terms a call to “primordial authenticity,” which is uncovered in the everydayness of things and given voice in the poetic utterance. The focus of this thesis differs from previous scholarship in that it sets out to make a detailed analysis of the whole volume of Seeing Things and takes as its starting point a Heideggerian approach, where the basic concept of “being-in-the-world” is understood in terms of the belonging together of self and world. I examine how this interrelation manifests itself in Heaney’s poetry. Heidegger rejects the transcendental subject as a starting point, and begins instead from an understanding of the immanent “givenness” of human existence. These ideas are thus used to explore the poetry of Seeing Things. In addition to Heidegger, this study is also influenced by the writings of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer’s theoretical approach with its concern for what he calls the “fusion of horizons,” is especially useful in studying Heaney’s poetry, where a strong sense of dialectic movement is evident between opposing forces.
Using these ideas of Heidegger and Gadamer, I trace a thematic Dantean quest for understanding in Seeing Things, and explore how, in the context of this journey, thresholds are crossed in a constant Heraclitean flow between the forces of fixity and flux. The study also traces various other binaries, such as absence and presence, speech and silence, which are part of our experience of being-in-the-world. I show how these oppositions are brought together in a poetics of understanding. Such experiences of awareness are seen as moments of epiphany, or what Gadamer calls “a shattering and demolition of the familiar.” Thus, central to this study is an understanding of the mystery and power of language, and of how poetry acts as a transforming vision of reality, or in the Heideggerian sense, as a proclamation of the holy that takes the “mysterious measure” of things. No such approach to Heaney’s Seeing Things, has, to my knowledge, been previously made.

In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard elaborates on the poetics of existential space and calls for a spatial concept of the subject that brings together subject and world, being and fantasy. The movement between such contrasting forces suggests the idea of poetry as an expression of becoming, of movement towards, regardless of destination. As such, the poetic utterance becomes a site where boundaries between self and world are blurred and differences are transgressed in a web of movement and visionary change. This paper explores Ní Chuilleanáin’s use of spatial metaphors in light of these dialectics

This special issue of Nordic Journal of English Studies is devoted to the research in Irish Studies being carried out in Scandinavia by a group of scholars based in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, as well as scholars associated—in one way or another—with Scandinavia. Denmark is represented by the University of Aalborg; Norway, by scholars affiliated to the Universities of Agder, the Artic University of Norway, Bergen, and Stavanger; and Sweden is represented by scholars from the universities of Dalarna, Göteborg, Stockholm, Södertörn and Umeå. Included also in this special issue is the work of two former students, who completed their Masters’ degree in Irish literature at DUCIS (Dalarna University Centre for Irish Studies), Sweden—from Norway and China respectively. The collection also contains an article by Dara Waldron, Limerick Institute of Technology, Ireland, whof recently presented his research at the Higher Seminar in Dalarna. Contributions by the Irish poet, Mary O’Donnell, who participated in the Nordic Irish Studies Network (NISN) conference, hosted by DUCIS in December 2012, are also included.

In the plays of Brian Friel, memory acts as a mediator in a complicated dance between past and present, a past that is often not what we thought it was, and a present that many times is not what we imagined it might be. Memory acts as a mediator between fact and fiction, between the reality of how things were, and our perception of that reality - how we imagined it to be. Memory acts as a mediator between ourselves and others, between who we imagine ourselves to be - how we perceive ourselves, and how others perceive us - who they imagine us to be.
Drawing on the theories of Hannah Arendt, who sees memory in an ethical sense as a “recounting of our lives,” this paper will examine the theme of memory in the plays of Brian Friel, where memory is seen not as a burden from the past that betrays, and deceives, and haunts us, but rather as an empowering force which brings together experiences in a unified whole. As Arendt points out in The Life of the Mind, we do not exist only in space, but also in time: “remembering, collecting and recollecting what no longer is present out of the ‘belly of memory’ (Augustine), anticipating and planning in the mode of willing what is not yet” ( 201).
My paper examines how Friel - in preserving experience through a narrative recounting - shows how memory acts as an enabling web of connections between self and world, so that what went before and what is happening now are given “a unified meaningful continuity” (Arendt), or in Heideggerian terms a “being-in-the-world.” I examine how Friel uses memory as a starting point, as a cathartic act that frees both the characters in the play and the audience from the shackles of the past. Thus memory is understood in Yeatsian terms as something that unites both the dancer and the dance, making room for what Seamus Heaney calls “the dancing place, the point of eternal renewal and confident departure” (Peacock, The Achievement of Brian Friel).

This special issue of Nordic Journal of English Studies is devoted to the research in Irish Studies being carried out in Scandinavia by a group of scholars based in Denmark, Norway and Sweden, as well as scholars associated—in one way or another—with Scandinavia. Denmark is represented by the University of Aalborg; Norway, by scholars affiliated to the Universities of Agder, the Artic University of Norway, Bergen, and Stavanger; and Sweden is represented by scholars from the universities of Dalarna, Göteborg, Stockholm, Södertörn and Umeå. Included also in this special issue is the work of two former students, who completed their Masters’ degree in Irish literature at DUCIS (Dalarna University Centre for Irish Studies), Sweden—from Norway and China respectively. The collection also contains an article by Dara Waldron, Limerick Institute of Technology, Ireland, whof recently presented his research at the Higher Seminar in Dalarna. Contributions by the Irish poet, Mary O’Donnell, who participated in the Nordic Irish Studies Network (NISN) conference, hosted by DUCIS in December 2012, are also included.

This study focuses on the element of the spiritual, or the numinous, in the poetry of the contemporary Irish poet, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, against the background of the debate on the fragmented subject of post-structuralism. Using as its starting point the ideas of theorists such as Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida in relation to the unspeakable other, the study shows how poetry can act as an instrument of power in giving voice to the existential experience of being. The study highlights the strong sense of the spiritual in the poetry of Ní Chuilleanáin, and traces how her poetry gives voice to the secret space beyond articulation, the poised moments of quietude and contemplation beyond language. In her painstaking and detailed observations of everyday phenomena and activities, Ní Chuilleanáin in her poetry captures the liminal, epiphanic moments of the everyday, transforming the ordinary into the extraordinary. Using a phenomenological and psychoanalytic approach, where focus is given to the interconnectedness of self and world and the bodily aspect of experience, the study demonstrates how language and being are united in an interactive fusion, as the speaking subject gives voice to both the existential and spiritual aspects of human experience